Villa Bogensee, the uncertain future of the mansion that belonged to Joseph Goebbels and that Berlin no longer wants to maintain

Joseph GoebbelsAdolf Hitler’s propaganda minister, one of the most radical ideologists of Nazism, committed suicide with the entry of Soviet troops into the German capital, leaving a property in Wandlitz, Berlin. The mansion, of 1,600 square meters, 61 rooms and a 17-hectare plot of land, which he himself had built in 1939, at the beginning of the Second World War.

In addition to Hitler’s propaganda minister, Goebbels was also ‘gauleiter’, head of the public administration of the capital of the German Reich, Berlin. In its maintenance, the Berlin City Council (which is the current owner) spends several hundred thousand euros annually, which include cleaning, renovations and surveillance so that it does not become a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis. The mayor got tired of wasting money and put the property up for sale.

Villa Bogenseeas it was known from the beginning and which was built with funds from the national film production company (which Goebbels controlled because it was attached to the Ministry of Propaganda) and on whose construction prisoners from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp worked like slaves, was not only a resting place for Goebbels, to which he took his lovers, many of them forced.

It was also a kind of second ministerial headquarters, a place where he worked many days, a second office where he received guests, even in cases of official visits.

When Goebbels died in Hitler’s Berlin bunker in the first days of May 1945, the Villa Bogensee became, after the division of Germany, to the Soviet-controlled zone and then to eastern Germanyl. It was first used as a lazaret and for four decades as a school to train the leading cadres of the German communist youth.

Every year more than 100 students from countries with communist regimes passed through it.. In the last decades of communist Germany, before German reunification, it had private uses (kindergarten, restaurant, hairdresser), until it was abandoned.

When the Berlin Wall fell It was occupied by an NGO, Internationaler Bund, which abandoned it in 2000. After more than two empty decades, the Berlin City Council got tired of paying for its maintenance and put it up for sale. In 2021, an association appeared that proposed using it as a hotel and conference workshops. One of the people behind the project was a well-known neo-Nazi and Berlin did not sell for fear that the villa would become a place of worship for Goebbels.

Tired of waiting, Mayor Berlin decided it was time to get it off his back and announced that he was giving it away. Three days after announcing it, Rabbi Menachem Margolin, president of the European Jewish Association (headquartered in Brussels), wrote to the mayor to announce that he was considering taking over the complex and converting it “into a center for the study of political psychology, communication and the fight against hate speech.”

The mansion has even served to create hoaxes. Months ago, accounts controlled by the Kremlin spread the lie on social networks that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had bought it. It was one more attempt to make people believe that Zelensky, a Jew, is actually a neo-Nazi. Russian propaganda repeats that Moscow is liberating Ukraine from Nazism.

P.B.